1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of e-marketing and more particularly to the field of pay-per-click marketing.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet has revolutionized the manner in which goods and services are marketed both locally and globally. The mere collection of a few electronic documents can represent a complex storefront when presented to the global computing community over the World Wide Web as a Web site. Interestingly, unlike the conventional sale of goods and services through a brick-and-mortar operation, the pages of a Web site can serve the purpose both of advertising and marketing medium and storefront. To wit, the content of a Web page can serve as a way to advertise goods and services, while also offering those same goods and services for sale responsive to a few mouse clicks.
Given the unique role of the Internet in the sale and marketing of goods and services, fundamental changes in traditional advertising and marketing have become apparent. In particular, e-marketing, unlike traditional marketing, involves a grass roots component. Search engines have facilitated the development of this grass roots component in which consumers discover the presence of a Web site through the postings of third parties. In the search engine paradigm, references to Web sites are cataloged and presented to consumers on demand in response to keyword searches.
The sheer volume of content indexed by the typical search engine can result in the individual Web sites becoming lost in the mix. Similar to a phone book entry among a sea of phone book entries, for many Web sites, the indexing of the Web site by the search engine can be as ineffective as not being indexed at all unless the Web site appears in the first few entries of a results list produced by the search engine. Accordingly, many Web sites rely on more advanced, fee-based, Internet based grass roots marketing techniques to advance the awareness of a Web site.
Specifically, whereas the grass roots nature of search engine linkage to a Web site involves no obligation on the part of the Web site owner/operator, other grass roots e-marketing techniques require the Web site operator to pay a fee. The presence of a fee necessarily reduces the number of marketed Web sites resulting in a higher level of visibility for a Web site. Once such fee-based, Internet grass roots marketing technique is pay-per-click marketing. In pay-per-click marketing, text or an image can be embedded in one Web site, however, when selected, the text or image can link to a second Web site. The first Web site is the host Web site and the second Web site is the marketed Web site.
In the pay-per-click model, whenever a viewer selects the text or image linking to the marketed Web site, the host Web site is compensated for the “click through”. In this way, the marketed Web site need only pay the host Web site for a successful attempt at grass roots marketing. Notwithstanding, the pay-per-click model presupposes that each click through is legitimate in nature. However, it is well-known that fraud has become prevalent throughout the pay-per-click world. Specifically, it is not uncommon for a host Web site to automate the periodic selection of a pay-per-click link in order to enhance revenues (fraudulently) to the host Web site. Likewise, it is also not uncommon for a competitor to the operator of the marketed Web site to automate the selection of a pay-per-click link in order to unnecessarily increase the marketing costs for the pay-per-click for the operator of the marketed Web site.